James Garner, RIP

James Garner is such a part of so many memories that it's hard to parcel out one from the other. The kids who grew up watching him turn the concept TV Western on its head in Maverick ended up loving him as Jim Rockford, who turned the concept of the TV detective on its head. His movie work was always solid, and sometimes wonderful. (To me, all motorcycles aside, he's still the best thing about The Great Escape.) And to watch he and Jack Lemmon work together in the otherwise ordinary My Fellow Americans was to watch Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus, in their autumn years, knocking it around a muni course with surpassing ease.

Lemmon: OK, I got one. When you were in the White House, who was the person you were most excited to meet?

Garner: Nelson Mandela.

Lemmon: I'm not a reporter.

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But what connected Brett Maverick with Jim Rockford, and what allowed Garner to send convention for a loop was the fact that, while not being cowards, both Brett and Jim were unconvinced that violence was necessarily a part of being either a Western hero or a private eye. They never saw the logic in it. This doesn't make sense. Somebody might get hurt here. And it might be me. QED, let's try to think our way out of this mess. It took a rare actor to turn that trick without appearing either cowardly or unpleasantly conniving. But the quintessence of this remarkable ability came in the criminally underrated film, The Americanization Of Emily, the screenplay to which, I think, is better than the one Paddy Chayefsky wrote for Network. Garner plays a "dog robber," a scrounger for an American admiral in London. He falls for Julie Andrews, a war widow who is both attracted to Garner, and put off by his complete disdain for what he perceives as the great con of wartime heroism.

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There is a scene in which she brings him home to meet her mother, and Garner's cynicism is too corrosive even for the old woman's politely disrespectful opinion of generals.

I don't trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham. It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a Hell it is. And it's always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades . . . we shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It's the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widows' weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices.... My brother died at Anzio -- an everyday soldier's death, no special heroism involved. They buried what pieces they found of him. But my mother insists he died a brave death and pretends to be very proud . . . [N]ow my other brother can't wait to reach enlistment age. That'll be in September. May be ministers and generals who blunder us into wars, but the least the rest of us can do is to resist honoring the institution. What has my mother got for pretending bravery was admirable? She's under constant sedation and terrified she may wake up one morning and find her last son has run off to be brave.

Leaving aside the fact that a speech like that is almost inconceivable today, Garner is dead serious here, and the grave way he delivers his message, his voice never rising or falling, in a deadly matter-of-fact way, is more formidable because of the breezy way he had with the character up until this point. There was an edge you never saw, somewhere beneath the easy smiles. But it only rarely came out. Somebody might get hurt.